What were they thinking: Games tied to player

Well, the New Year is off to a great start - at least in terms of patents being published that get my craw. In this case, it is a game maker who has decided they want to control who can play their games, who can sell them and if they can ever be resold...

Well, the New Year is off to a great start – at least in terms of patents being published that get my craw. In this case, it is a game maker who has decided they want to control who can play their games, who can sell them and if they can ever be resold. The manufacturer in question is Sony and they had a patent published yesterday, that if issued and actively used, may well make some steer clear of their content – unless of course Sony bands together with other game makers to basically try and control the market in the way the motion picture association does. Just to be clear, this patent has not issued yet - only been published which means that it is in the pipeline.

The abstract reads “A game playing system includes a use permission tag provided for use in a game disk for a user of a game, a disk drive, and a reproduction device for reproducing the game. The disk drive reads out a disk ID from the game disk. When the game is to be played, the reproduction device conveys the disk ID and a player ID to the use permission tag. The use permission tag stores the terms of use of the game and determines whether a combination of the disk ID and the player ID conveyed from the reproduction device fulfills the terms of use or not.”

In the description they specifically talk about the second hand market for games. They say [when] electronic content is bought and sold in the second-hand markets or the like, the sales proceeds resulting therefrom are not redistributed to the developers. Also, since the users who have purchased the second-hand items are somehow no longer potential buyers of the content, the developers would lose their profits otherwise gained in the first place.

This was never a problem for books, and the whole notion of a library would suggest that the potential market for books should be close to zero. They seem to be forgetting that games sold on the second hand market are often older in nature and I know people who would not be able to afford to buy the latest game if they could not sell their older ones to help offset the new game costs.

Today, they do this by requiring online authentication and this works well for multi-player games where you have to be connected to the Internet. This patent is focused on stopping the sale of games that are played on a single machine where Internet authentication can be avoided. They even say -

As a technique to suppress the second-hand sales and purchase, a user may be first required to send a password or the like to a remote authentication server from a reproduction device (game player) via the Internet and the reproduction of content may be permitted only for the device that has succeeded in authentication.

With this invention they are suggesting that the disk is supplied with an RFID tag which basically provides the disk with a personal serial number.

While they deserve protection from copying is it right for them to try and restrict the secondary market?

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The way I read it is that Sony wishes to charge again for a license that's already purchased. You can resell the disk the program came on, but the new owner will be forced to buy another license to use it.
One only need to look at Sony's financial statements of the past few years to understand why they are doing this.

I for one certainly hope that this patent is denied. Main reason is that I see no difference between Sony's idea and various other software/hardware DRM schemes for games that have been around for decades - I can think of several DOS games I have on 5-1/4" floppies that tied themselves to the hardware that they were installed on and used various subterfuges to prevent copying the disks. To me, just because they want to do this on a game console vs a PC is irrelevant.

I wrote off Sony years ago after I bought my first DVD player from them. It would not play any CD or DVD that was written on a computer. No doubt they thought that doing so would inhibit piracy. Well, I'm not a pirate, but it did block the playing of CDs and DVDs made by our school and other independent producers as well as those that I made with video from trips recorded by my SONY digital 8 camcorder. After that I completely stopped buying Sony products.
The silver lining for me in this cloud is that this patent is owned by a company that I already won't buy anything from. Hopefully others will not get to use it. Hmmm - unless they license it for some kind of Blu-Ray+ or some such. Maybe it is really all about the movies anyway.

I understand exactly what the greedy folks at Sony want to do, and there is a simple and totally legal cure for this kind of greed, which is for nobody to purchase ANY Sony product until they change their policy. If the entire public could unite and simply refuse to purchase any Sony products, the message could get across.
After all, the laws are fairly clear, which is that when you buy the product you have the right to use it and to sell it. What you can't do legally is sell copies. Even Microsoft lets people transfer ownership legally, provided they don't keep a copy.
So really, a total boycott of all things Sony is the very best cure available. America does NOT need Sony!

I'm not sure I understand. Are they trying to patent restricting the secondary market or just a method of restricting the secondary market?
And hasn't this already been done? I recall some software licenses that were tied to the hard drive ID so you could only install it on one computer. Unless they don't mean by player ID the hardware that the game plays on but the actually user. I think the customer would get upset if you tried to tag them.